The War of the Wenuses eBook

Grotesque and foolish as it may seem to the scientific
reader, I was entirely unable to answer this simple
conundrum. My mind reverted to my school days.
I found myself declining musa. Curious
to relate, I had entirely forgotten the genitive of
ego.... With infinite trouble I managed
to break into a vegetarian restaurant, and made a meal
off some precocious haricot beans, a brace of Welsh
rabbits, and ten bottles of botanic beer.

Working back into Holland Park Avenue and thence keeping
steadily along High Street, Notting Hill Gate, I determined
to make my way to the Marble Arch, in the hopes of
finding some fresh materials for my studies in the
Stone Age.

In Bark Place, where the Ladies’ Kennel Club
had made their vast grand-stand, were a number of
pitiful vestiges of the Waterloo of women-kind.
There was a shattered Elswick bicycle, about sixteen
yards and a half of nun’s veiling, and fifty-three
tortoise-shell side-combs. I gazed on the debris
with apathy mingled with contempt. My movements
were languid, my plans of the vaguest. I knew
that I wished to avoid my wife, but had no clear idea
how the avoiding was to be done.

V.

BUBBLES.

From Orme Square, a lean-faced, unkempt and haggard
waif, I drifted to Great Orme’s Head and back
again. Senile dementia had already laid its spectral
clutch upon my wizened cerebellum when I was rescued
by some kindly people, who tell me that they found
me scorching down Hays Hill on a cushion-tired ordinary.
They have since told me that I was singing “My
name is John Wellington Wells, Hurrah!” and other
snatches from a pre-Wenusian opera.

These generous folk, though severely harassed by their
own anxieties, took me in and cared for me. I
was a lonely man and a sad one, and they bored me.
In spite of my desire to give public expression to
my gratitude, they have refused to allow their names
to appear in these pages, and they consequently enjoy
the proud prerogative of being the only anonymous
persons in this book. I stayed with them at the
Bath Club for four days, and with tears parted from
them on the spring-board. They would have kept
me for ever, but that would have interfered with my
literary plans. Besides, I had a morbid desire
to gaze on the Wenuses once more.

And so I went out into the streets again, guided by
the weird Voice, and via Grafton Street, Albemarle
Street, the Royal Arcade, Bond Street, Burlington
Gardens, Vigo Street and Sackville Street, Piccadilly,
Regent Street, Pall Mall East, Cockspur Street and
Whitehall, steadily wheeled my way across Westminster
Bridge.

There were few people about and their skins were all
yellow. Lessing, presumably in his Laocoon,
has attributed this to the effects of sheer panic;
but Carver’s explanation, which attributes the
ochre-like tint to the hypodermic operation of the
Mash-Glance, seems far more plausible. For myself
I abstain from casting the weight of my support in
either scale, because my particular province is speculative
philosophy and not comparative dermatology.